Prisoner advocate says prisons create more crime victims

Children with a parent in prison have a 70 percent probability of one day going to prison themselves.

Carolyn Esparza, founder and executive director of Community Solutions of El Paso, gave that harrowing statistic to an assembled group of the Behavioral Health Local Collaborative last week.

"It's not because they are poorly parented," she said, adding that most of the children that come to her organization are well mannered and behave. "They deal with so much pain from anger, from grief. They are traumatized by the whole experience."

Esparza, who works with prisoners and their families, co-wrote a book on the prison family experience and chairs the National Prisoners Family Conference.

It might not be a popular idea, but she advocates for the average person in prison and his or her family who might suffer mistreatment at the hands of a vast prison system.

She lives and works in Texas, a state which had one maximum security juvenile detention facility in the 1980s and now has 11.

She has heard the horror stories -- prisoners not allowed to use the restroom until they messed their uniforms and were then made to stand in that deplorable state for hours. She said prisoners are not being allowed to take showers because of water shortages.

The mentally ill are often left alone without the medication they need, spiraling further into madness.

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Prisoners are kept in solitary confinement for years and then thrown out on the street when their sentence is up, unprepared to be in the world and most likely prison-bound once again.

"You have people coming out and they are hostile because they have been treated like animals," Esparza said.

Dental care often means getting teeth pulled (and nothing more) and convicts have been known to wait for years for surgery they need if their condition is not considered "life threatening."

The list goes on and on -- and that's just for people in prison, Esparza said. Most of them have family members who, though they are out in the world, also suffer.

Families of people in prison often don't fare much better, being treated with contempt by prison officials, she said, and are often afraid to even approach them with their concerns.

Esparza said much of the problem is a lack of oversight throughout the criminal justice system. She would liked to see more citizen oversight that is not "beholden" to government.

The Prisoners Family Conference offers a "bill of rights" for people who have loved ones incarcerated. It is available at prisonersfamilyconference.org.

Esparza said victims of crime must always be accounted for, but throwing people in prison with no rehabilitation and systemically mistreating them will only serve to create more crime victims in the long run.

"I'm not saying 'free all the prisoners,'" she said. "Some people belong in prison and need to be there for life."